Secret Sauce: Inspiring Stories of Great Indian Restaurants

Preface

THE ORIGINS OF this book lie in our previous work, Start Up Your Restaurant, the research for which involved scouring the dining-out landscape for businesses that exemplify, for the aspiring restaurateur, ways to achieve success in a notoriously fickle industry. Although the more frequently asked question today is ‘Where are we eating/ordering from?’ than ‘What are we eating?’ and even though the decline in cooking at home has led to increased dependence on restaurants and made dining out a favoured leisure activity, the casualty rate in the food services business is high.

And yet, in this punishing environment, like persistent plants that flourish on unyielding land, we come across remarkable restaurants across India that have endured, by achieving – and maintaining – high standards of culinary excellence and/or becoming commercially successful. The stories of these restaurants, we were convinced, needed to be told, celebrated, and perhaps, even emulated. It is this conviction that served as the inspiration for this book.

Given the alarmingly high shut-down rate of restaurants, those that have endured for even a couple of decades call for applause. Imagine then, the scale of achievement when a restaurant has been in business for a century and more. The history of the restaurant business in India is somewhat lost in the smoky haze of time. This shouldn’t be surprising, for this is, even today, an unorganized industry. In France, for example, a country which prides itself on preserving its culinary heritage, there’s fogginess on how the very first restaurant came about. For a long time, it was believed that a certain Monsieur Boulanger opened Paris’s first restaurant in the year 1765, and that it sported the sign ‘Boulanger débite des restaurants divins’ (Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods). It was only recently that an expert in European history debunked this story, saying no such person existed. In any case, it was the first establishment to use the word ‘restaurant’, a place that offered ‘restoratives’ or ‘sustenance’.

In India, we have no such story – authentic or apocryphal – of how the first modern restaurant came about. What we do know with some certainty is that they took shape around the late nineteenth century. Leopold Café & Bar, now a landmark in Mumbai as one of the targets of the dastardly 26 November 2011 terrorist attacks, opened in 1871 originally as a store, then metamorphosed into a restaurant. Today, almost a century and a half later, it continues to be hugely popular and customers frequently wait in a queue before finding seating. Whether you’re a restaurateur or a food lover, wouldn’t you want to know the secret behind Leopold’s longevity and success? We certainly wanted to and, as you’ll read in the following pages, it’s an engaging account.

There are other similar restaurants which opened at the turn of the century in India and continue to be fully operational and profitable, and became landmarks in their territories. Today, their iconic status and sheer nostalgia is sufficient to drive business. That doesn’t however allow Bengaluru’s much-loved MTR, which opened in 1924 and is credited with ‘inventing’ the rava idli, to sit back and rely on past glory. Its third-generation owners are on an expansion spree, even outside India. The MTR story encapsulates how a pre-Independence era eatery has made a smooth transition to the age of the millennials. In Bengaluru, restaurants of a similar vintage, such as Vidyarthi Bhavan – preferred haunt of Karnataka’s chief ministers – often topping the ‘best dosa maker in the city’ lists, have fascinating stories around them.

Similar century-old eateries are paeans also to a pioneering spirit. Those early restaurateurs ventured into a realm which promised no glamour or celebrity status as is the case today, when ‘I want to have my own restaurant’ is a common refrain. Delhi’s post-Partition turmoil saw Kundal Lal Gujral, a specialist in tandoori fare in Peshawar, crossing over to create butter chicken at Moti Mahal, a brand that continues to endure despite upheavals.

Meanwhile in Kolkata and Darjeeling, some decades before Independence, elegant tea rooms were set up to cater to the sahibs and memsaabs of the British Raj – Flurys on Kolkata’s Park Street and Glenary’s in Darjeeling’s Chauk Bazaar find a mention in every tour guide to these cities. Not everything in those days was about sophistication and West-influenced patisserie though. In Delhi’s bustling Jama Masjid area, royal cuisine was being served to the common man at Karim, by a descendant of the cooks of former Mughal emperors. What inspired those early restaurateurs to enter the food business and how did they manage to pass the baton on to the generations that followed or to new owners? These are questions that intrigued us and our discoveries are chronicled here.

The restaurants that opened for business pre- and just after Independence brought a unique vintage and entrepreneurial spirit to the Indian food services business. But another big surge happened in post-liberalization India. As more and more Indians became enamoured with fine dining, the urban middle-class, armed with disposable incomes, decided that food was not mere sustenance – it could be a leisure activity, even an amusing diversion. The five-star hotels were on hand to cater to such pleasure-seekers. Bukhara at the ITC Maurya in Delhi soon became the capital’s most famous dining room. Down south, Karavalli at Bengaluru’s Gateway Hotel, introduced what was then a revolutionary concept of home-style coastal cooking in a five-star setting. Both these restaurants have been in business for more than a quarter of a century and have won huge accolades for their culinary excellence. Few cities in other parts of the world have hotels that are particularly known for their food. India bucks the trend and these trend-setters have their own tales to tell. Outside the rarefied environs of luxury hotels, in a charmingly rustic setting, there is Vishalla, in Ahmedabad – an outlier for forty years. This was one man’s dream that became an anti-urban idyll and went on to become successful against all odds.

There were other dynamic entrepreneurs with a love – and knowledge – of food who believed that great food and good times were not the exclusive preserve of five-star hotels. Armed with sheer passion – the venture capital investments would come much later – they dived in, changing forever the way the urban population eats and spends its leisure time. A.D. Singh created Just Desserts in Mumbai, a hangout for young people, before going on to build Olive Bar & Kitchen and later, provided a platform for the entrepreneurial ambitions of the talented chef Manu Chandra. Riyaaz Amlani, meanwhile, began with the cool café, Mocha, and later created other restaurant formats, including the hangout-cum-workspace, Social. A food pro, Sanjay Mahtani and a business expert, Jay Singh, came together to form JSM, testing and succeeding with Hard Rock Café under a franchise model and created upscale dine-out brands such as Shiro.

Building large restaurant businesses alongside these young turks were ventures such as Speciality, Anjan Chatterjee’s company which gave us Mainland China and Oh! Calcutta. Soon, Barbeque Nation arrived on the scene and grew even as it tasted success, having tapped into the Indian customer’s penchant for eat-all-you-want offerings. How did these restaurant businesses come to gauge and understand the Indian customer’s tastes and willingness to spend – which even professional market surveys find difficult to pin down – and create products and experiences of aspirational value? The stories of these mega Indian restaurant businesses set out to answer this question that every restaurateur asks.

The biggest South Indian chains, Saravana Bhavan and Adayar Ananda Bhavan, had no such complex questions to tackle. From the very beginning, their mission has been to serve familiar foods to locals at affordable prices in a clean, hygienic setting. Their plan worked, and today their balance sheets boast of healthy bottom-lines and they have the confidence to expand at a rate food brands under multinational companies (MNCs) would envy.

Speaking of MNCs, we debated long and hard about including their food brands in this collection. If one were to examine critically, Domino’s, in our opinion, doesn’t serve the best pizzas. Yet, we couldn’t possibly ignore its impact as a brand and the financial success it has achieved. Domino’s came into the Indian market carrying the power of its global brands and convinced Indians that pizza margarita was real food; that a plastic tray of garlic bread and fries was something to aspire to. They pandered smartly to the desi palate with paneer tikka pizza and lamb pepperoni. Another global brand, Subway, perfected the franchising model for restaurants in India, a feat no other brand has accomplished at this scale. The size and scope of these food businesses and their capacity to transform not just the market, but the eating-out habits of an entire population is certainly worth narrating.

We’ve dined at these restaurants – well, eating more dosas and parathas than pizza, to be honest – spent long hours with their owners, architects, chefs, managers, long-serving waiters; interviewed experts and delved into archives to bring this fascinating collection together. Some tales are long and detailed, others short and snappy, nevertheless they still capture the essence of these successful businesses. It’s important to add here that this book is not a guide to eating out, neither is it an exhaustive list – that would take us several volumes. We have attempted, however, to pick and choose restaurants representative of different vintages, cuisines, regions of the country, business models, scale and size. We are aware that our selection will cause consternation, even anger in some readers; their favourites may not be in this book, or they may disagree with some of our choices. We ask only that you appreciate how daunting a task it is to put a list such as this together, skewed as it is bound to be by subjectivity. To be sure, this book could be the beginning of a dialogue and your responses could very well warrant a second edition.

Besides serving as an inspiration to restaurateurs across the country and whetting the appetite of the ever-growing breed of food lovers, we’ve also aimed to make Secret Sauce a history of the restaurant business in India. In a country where the wisdom of eons dictates that we are what we eat, this would then also be a chronicle of us as a people and as a culture.

1

Adyar Ananda Bhavan

A sweet stall that became a super-sized chain

JOINT MANAGING DIRECTOR of Adyar Ananda Bhavan (A2B) K.T. Srinivasa Raja is not an easy subject to interview. Sitting amidst artificial foliage and flowers in his office in Ambattur, Chennai, where A2B has it production units, he signs a six-inch tall pile of cheques through the conversation, looking up occasionally to answer questions. Clearly, even if the business has grown to nearly 100 outlets from the single sweet stall where it all began, the enterprise is still tightly controlled by the family, just as it was when his father, K. Thirupati Raja, started his first sweet shop in 1965. Apparently, Raja, as he was known, allowed no one access to the kalla petti, the cash box.

Justifiably so, for this humble sweet-maker had clawed his way up in life, often coming precariously close to being broken by the sharp vicissitudes of fortune, before he could establish a business that began to yield returns and assure him a settled life. A2B, now a familiar presence in cities and towns across Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and occupying prime locations on arterial highways, also achieved another milestone by opening its first overseas unit in Frisco, Texas in 2017.

The chain owes its success to the perseverance and never-say-die attitude of the founder K. Thirupati Raja. At a very young age he seemed to know that he wanted to go somewhere, achieve something big, even if he wasn’t entirely certain where or what that was when he set out.

In 1938, at the age of ten, he ran away from his home in Rajapalayam to escape the fate of being a farmer. In an era when child labour was not frowned upon, the little boy went to work at a lunch home in Chennai as a cleaner, literally working himself to the bone. There, he formed a bond with the ‘master’, Achuthan Nair, a man he would remember through his life. It was from Nair that the young Raja learnt the basics and the nuances of cooking. The experience also impressed on him the important role the ‘master’ played in a food business. For Adyar Ananda Bhavan he would pick the ‘masters’ with care and train them personally.

The cleaning job took a toll on his health. After a brief spell recuperating at home in Rajapalayam, Raja went to Bombay, seeking his fortune there. He was employed as a mill hand, but a shut-down put paid to that career and he came upon the first of the many hurdles he would face. Raja’s life was increasingly beginning to resemble the black and white Tamil tragedy films of the time. Interestingly, when he was frequenting the area around Filmistan in Bombay, he befriended a man working in the film industry who tried to convince him to join the movies. Raja was not tempted, though – his mind was set on being a businessman.

Unwilling to return to the farming life back in Rajapalayam, he became a dealer in books and vessels, targeting the Tamil community in Bombay. Marriage and the demands of starting a family required him to return home. Armed with the sweet-making skills he had learnt from a friend in Bombay, he opened his first shop in Ambala Puli Bazaar in 1965. It did reasonable business, but the profits weren’t big enough to keep Raja out of debt.

He then took a sugarcane farm on lease, even experimenting with a sweet made from cane sugar and coconut oil. However, a cyclone in 1973 destroyed his farm and, therefore, his business. His sons say that was one of the lowest points in Raja’s life. A friend then suggested he open a sweet shop in Bangalore and Raja found a place in Srirampuram. One by one, his two sons, Venkatesa Raja and Srinivasa Raja, discontinued their studies and joined their father, helping him source supplies and produce the sweets and savouries Srinivasa Sweets came to be known for.

In 1979, Raja moved to Chennai, finding a space in Old Washermenpet and called it Sri Ananda Bhavan. At last, his business seemed to be bringing him returns and he was able to settle debts and replace the family jewellery he had pawned and lost in the bad times. A deeply religious man, Raja made weekly trips to the Mangadu Kamakshi Amman temple outside Madras. One day, he decided to go instead to the Ashtalakshmi temple in Adyar. Near the bus stand he happened to see a shop that was available for lease. He spent days observing the place, counting the number of vehicles and people who passed that way. This, Raja decided, would be a good place to open his next store. But fate was unkind, yet again – the property was embroiled in a sub-lease complication. It took him a year and a half to finally acquire the place and in 1988 it was inaugurated by Kirubananda Variyar, the spiritual teacher Raja was devoted to, and Adyar Ananda Bhavan opened its doors to its first customers. Four years later, Raja opened an outlet in Puraswalkam and the extra space allowed Raja to offer chaat, an arrangement he had observed in Bombay’s sweet shops. The Kolkata-style chaat won over Chennaiites.

Later, the Raja family opened a store in Pondicherry, and encouraged by customer requests for hot food, decided to branch out from sweet stalls and opened Adyar Ananda Bhavan’s first self-service restaurant, marking their foray into the business. ‘There was a demand from customers, who enjoyed our sweets and savouries, for breakfast, lunch and dinner,’ Srinivasa Raja says. The success of their first restaurant and the simultaneous surge in the sale of sweets because of the additional footfalls for the restaurant, convinced the A2B team that the ‘All-in’ model – large units with a sweet stall and a morning-to-night restaurant – was the way to go. The smart thing A2B did was to ensure that the sweets’ display was clearly visible from the seating area. It is believed that customers who keep seeing the sweets while they have their meals invariably make a purchase.

Traditionally, all A2Bs are quick-service restaurants, known for their speed, affordability and convenience. The self-service areas are arranged so that customers see the food first and then buy, same as the set-up at the sweet counters. ‘This prompts customers to order items they would normally not buy off a printed menu, as they see the food and get excited,’ says Raja. Also, the display-counter model demands that the area is kept clean and hygienic. It’s easy for staff to simply pick up the food and serve customers without depending on the kitchen. Later additions such as live counters for specials such as poli, kuzhi paniyaram and the highly-rated coffee have enhanced the customer experience. Besides, customers waiting by the live counters are unlikely to complain about delays in being served as they see the crowd ahead of them and the staff working at speed.

In the 2000s, an air-conditioned service section was added to the eateries, in addition to the self-service area. Realizing that customers, especially those who came in groups, found it difficult to go back and forth from the self-service counter and were willing to pay for service, A2B introduced an air-conditioned dining hall with table service at its outlets. These were well-integrated into the main unit and served by the same kitchen. At the dining hall, waiters do what customers do in the self-service section. After a customer places an order from the menu, the waiter generates the order token, picks up the food from the self-service counters and serves it at the table. More recently, A2B has implemented technology solutions and separated order-taking staff from the servers to speed up the process.

Expansion has happened